tigertoy

I blew off cooking last night so I really needed to use the ~4 oz of chicken breast I'd thawed, but I didn't know what to make but I knew I didn't want the same old thing. So, I thought, I use rice the great majority of the time, and I just finished something with macaroni. Something different is needed. Quinoa! And corn and quinoa complement each other amino-acid wise, making them an excellent source of protein together, or so I've heard. My fridge is bare of veggies, so, hmm, how about a can of bamboo shoots? And how about an apple? I have those and that would be different. And I was thinking of cheddar cheese.

I got out my trusty round-bottom wok that I use for almost everything and started the onions frying so they'd be a little caramelized, diced the chicken finely, and tossed it in to brown. I knew I'd need some salt, and I asked myself, what spices should I use today? Ginger! Let's try ginger. I diced the apple while the chicken cooked. (Pink Lady, for the record. In addition to being the best eating apple (fight me) they are pretty good for cooking, although I buy Granny Smith if I have a plan to cook with apple when I'm at the store.) I let the apple cook a bit while I opened the cans of corn and bamboo shoots and then dumped those into the pan. I measured 3/4 of a cup of quinoa, totally spaced out on rinsing it, and added that to the pan. A quick taste and it seemed like it was mostly just sweet from the corn, so I added more salt and more ginger and a little water and let the quinoa start to cook. I went through several cycles of is the quinoa done yet? Nope, add some more water and give it a few more minutes. Finally, it seemed pretty much done, but still lacking in flavor, so yet more salt and ginger went in. Somewhere along the line, I'd realized that I was game to try cheddar cheese with the apple, but I didn't think it would work with the ginger so I left it out.

Once the quinoa was finally done, I put lunch in a bowl and the rest in single meal sized tupperware. I began to eat and pronounced it good. It was tasty enough that I might well try to duplicate it. I think it took an hour from start to finish and I don't understand how, but that's how cooking goes no matter what I'm making.

Ingredients (spice amounts are best guesses after the fact, I just throw stuff in the pan)
large skillet with enough oil to coat the bottom well
4 oz boneless chicken breast, diced finely
1 oz chopped onion
1 tsp ground ginger (half at the start, half later)
1 tsp salt (half at start, half later)
1 oz can bamboo shoots (including liquid)
1 14.5 oz can sweet corn (including liquid)
1 medium firm textured tart apple, cored, cut into 1/4-1/2" bits, not peeled
3/4 c quinoa (plain, dry grain, not any sort of mix)

In my fridge, I had one large zucchini that I forgot I had when I should have used it a couple of days ago, 2/3 of a chicken breast I kept out when I froze the rest of the package, and half a can of Cream of Jalapeño soup. (I bought the soup on a "let's see what we can do with this" whim. The soup is a disappointment, it has almost no heat but plenty of the flavor of jalapeños, which I don't much like.) Add to this the fact that I'm trying to experiment with quinoa in my culinary travels, and I came up with this:

Caramelize 1/4 cup of chopped onion
Add 4 oz finely diced chicken breast
Add some salt, 1 tsp or so
Add 1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, chopped as finely as possible
When the chicken is cooked, add the zucchini, sliced
Simmer until the zucchini is mostly cooked
Add 1/2 cup of quinoa, rinsed in the strainer I just bought
Add 1/2 cup water, bring to boil, simmer 10 minutes
Add some more water until it looks right
Simmer another 10 minutes, quinoa should be done
Add 2 oz. shredded sharp cheddar cheese
Add 1/2 can condensed cream of something soup (will try cream of onion next time I think)
Stir until thoroughly mixed together

Serves me 3 times.

Tonight we switch to standard time, or as I like to call it, Daylight Wasting Time. As someone with a touch of seasonal affective disorder, it really hurts to lose that hour of useful daylight when I could be out hiking. This is the true start of the dark time, my season of misery.

I have some big problems in my life. What they are isn't the point of this post; I'm looking at how I deal with problems. The least functional way I have of dealing with a problem is to metaphorically hide under the bed. The problem is too big to have any solution I can see. Thinking about it is distressing. So I just ignore it and pay attention to other things.

In a slightly more functional mode, I see that the whole problem is too big, but there is one part of it that I can address, and then I focus on that part. That part is something I can work on. The problem is that I focus on that part, however trivial it is, and continue to ignore the rest of the problem. If the thought of the larger problem comes up, I tell myself I'm doing the small thing so I'm taking care of it.

This is only slightly more functional than completely ignoring the problem if the part I've chosen is trivial. To take an example from my own past, my house is perpetually horribly cluttered. When I was actively playing Magic: the Gathering, my magic cards were a significant part of the clutter. I would direct the energy for dealing with the clutter into obsessively sorting cards while the rest of the clutter continued to build up.

The reason I bring this up, the real point of this post, is that I had an insight that as a society we are caught up in the same trap. For an example, consider the cold war. The problem that the world could be blown up in a nuclear war was too big to deal with, so there was a lot of hiding under the bed. However, there was also a lot of energy put into trivial gestures. School children were taught duck and cover drills and shelters were designated and stocked with emergency food rations. Doing these things helped people to feel that they were doing something, but if one considers an actual nuclear war, one realizes that these things wouldn't really make any difference.

More relevant to our situation today is the problem of how we're destroying our environment. We realize, when we bring ourselves to think of it, the extent of damage we're constantly doing to our planet, but we don't see how we can really fix it. But we've hit on recycling. "I'm recycling my plastic bottles," we say, "so I'm helping. I'm doing my bit." I can't argue that recycling in itself has no value at all, but it has much less value than we give it credit for. Many of those plastic bottles we virtuously put in the recycling bin end up in the landfill anyway, very few of them become more plastic bottles, and even when they do the process uses a lot of resources along the way. It would be better to not buy a one use bottle at all. It would be better than that to get our municipal water systems to the point where nobody felt they needed single use water bottles.

Why am I still hearing people talking in the media about how Trump won because of how he appealed to the white working class or the Democrats lost because they didn't have a coherent economic message? Trump has a core constituency who love him, and it's bigger than I want to admit, but it's still a minority. The Democrats in general do need a more coherent message. But the reason Clinton lost the election is because everyone hates her. I'm convinced that Democrats and moderate leaning independents stayed home in droves because they couldn't make themselves pull the lever for Clinton.

The lesson the Democrats need to take from this election is not to appeal more to their base. It's not to have a more convincing message. It's to not put up a candidate that half the country despises beyond coherent thought and the other half merely doesn't like. Don't let the party hacks put up a candidate because she's "paid her dues" and somehow earned it. Put up a candidate that people actually like and they'll win in a landslide.

It's OVFF time! If any of the three people who read this care, I will have EFRC calendars available as usual; if you tell me now you want one, I'll make a point of finding you at the con.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing lots of music, as many hugs as possible, and painful choices for the Pegasus awards!

I've just returned from my eclipse trip. There were enough clouds in the area that we were nervous, but it was clear where the sun was at the big moment. The eclipse itself was incredibly beautiful, but not quite the spiritual experience it was for some people. The light of the partial eclipse though the trees was cool but it doesn't like up to my memory of the partial eclipse in Champaign some years ago, I don't know if it's just the effect of memory or if I just couldn't find a really good spot to see it.

Touch of Nature where we were staying is a very nice place and I'd love to visit again when it's not so hot and humid, I spent a fair bit of time hiking/walking around but I would have spent even more if it had been less uncomfortable. Astronomy people are incredibly nice and happy to share their cool toys; I got a good look at Saturn on Saturday night. The meals they provided were not exciting but edible, and I still managed to eat more than I should have.

My real camera decided to crap out on me, so I was limited to taking pictures with my cell phone. I did not have my phone out during the eclipse but I took pictures of nature-y things while I was there. I didn't bring my guitar and I guess I should have, there were campfire sings on Saturday and Sunday. Although I would still have been really shy about playing in front of a group of strangers who didn't know my kind of music -- I don't really know campfire songs. The camera that didn't work is almost as heavy, though more compact, than the guitar.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong with our economy and what might be done to fix it. Of course, the rich and powerful would never allow things to upset their happy apple cart, so pretty much the only way they could happen would be if they put me in charge.

I dashed off some of my thoughts in a chat group I'm in and I thought I'd record them here, for my own interest if nothing more.

( stuff in here )

Today's XKCD:



My comment: If you can't do the math you don't know the subject. If you don't understand it intuitively without resorting to the math, you don't really understand the subject. So basically nobody understands modern physics.

I'm going to post something here that may get me yelled it, but it's something I believe.

This was inspired by a story I just heard on the radio about how some kids in Hannibal, MO got lost in a cave and were never found. It described how they went off on their own and no one was concerned until they didn't come home for dinner, and how that would never happen today. It would be considered child neglect.

( long and somewhat incendiary comment inside )